Enterprises today face evolving global data privacy risks and challenges. Explosive proliferation of business-critical and sensitive electronic data stored in multiple applications and databases, together with mobile workforces scattered around the globe, exacerbate the situation.
A fundamental technique used to secure data and render it useless when improperly accessed, as by individuals or systems without proper credentials, encryption keys are used to encrypt data. The encrypted data, called cipher text, is generally larger than the original value. In a database environment, a larger data size requires expanding the size of the field to accommodate the storage of the cipher text, which would in turn require changing the database schema to accommodate different size data. That process that only presents a large workload, but it also poses considerable risk
Storing data in encrypted form for credit card numbers, health data, or other sensitive information is much safer than storing clear text values, though some risk remains, as encryption keys must be distributed to all systems that need to decrypt the information. It is possible for even such a distributed system to be compromised by a sophisticated hacking attack.
Therefore, a long-felt but unresolved need exists for a system or method that provides secure access to sensitive data, while maintaining the data format for easy utilization by existing systems.